Christopher Lloyd Reads from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Over the past four decades, Emmy Award–winning actor Christopher Lloyd has portrayed some of pop culture’s most beloved—and batty—characters, from the eternally spaced-out Reverend Jim Ignatowski (“Iggy”) on television’s Taxi, to the fiery inventor Dr. Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy, to the incorrigible Uncle Fester in theAddams Family films. But the first major-motion-picture role that “shifted my life into a whole different experience,” he once said, was as psychiatric patient Max Taber in the film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (In the December issue of Vanity Fair, read contributing editor James Wolcott’s column about the timelessness of the novel.) Now, a half-century after Cuckoo’s Nest’s first publication and 36 years after its film debut, Lloyd—who reprises his role as a marine biologist in January’s Piranha 3DD—reads a memorable scene from Kesey’s classic. In it, he introduces listeners to one of literature’s great lightning rods: the “new redheaded Admission” to the mental ward, Randle McMurphy.